Monday, December 15, 2008

PTR Data

All from MMO-Champion

Shaman (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Elemental Shaman changes (Source)
Hopefully this won't get buried here. Here is what we are thinking about to try on the PTR for Elemental:


Elemental Oath -- In addition to existing effects, now increases spell damage done by the Shaman by 5/10% while Elemental Focus Clearcasting is active.
Elemental Mastery -- Overhauled. Now increases the Shaman’s critical strike chance by 20% for 30 seconds. Cooldown remains 3 minutes. We recognize this might be a slight nerf in certain PvP situations where players relied on the shaman to nuke an injured person to death. Still, I'm betting most shamans will prefer the new design.
Glyph of Lightning Bolt -- No longer affects cost. Now increases damage by 4%

Glyph used to fix Lightning Bolt
We didn't make the change for that reason. We looked at what specs were getting out of their glyphs and it turns out that some specs were getting a decent dps increase while Elemental was not. No matter what we did to other talents and spells, this imabalnce would continue to keep Elemental dps lower than what we wanted. (Source)

Reasons behind the changes to Water Shield
This was the issue. It wasn't a healer niche problem at all. Shamans were just abandoning Healing Wave to cast Lesser Healing Wave since it was more efficient for procing Improved Water Shield, which felt weird. (Source)
More Shaman (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Enhancement

Mental Quickness now increases your spell power by an amount equal to 23/46/70% of your agility. (Old - 10/20/30% of your attack power, this is temporary and it will be reverted to attack power according to this post)

Restoration

Healing Way doesn't stack up to 3 times anymore and now increases the effect of subsequent Healing Wave spells on the target by 18%. (Up from 6%)
Improved Water Shield has been changed to - You have a 33/66/100% chance to instantly consume a Water Shield Orb when you gain a critical effect from your Healing Wave or Riptide spells, and a 19.8/39.6/60% chance when you gain a critical effect from your Lesser Healing Wave spell.

Glyph

Glyph of Windfury Weapon - Increases the chance per swing for Windfury Weapon to trigger by 5%. (Old - The attack power bonus on the additional attacks granted by Windfury Weapon is increased by 40%.)
Glyph of Fire Nova Totem - Reduces the cooldown of your Fire Nova Totem by 3 seconds. (Old - Increases the radius of Fire Nova Totem's effect by 2 yards.)
Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem - Reduces the cooldown of your Fire Elemental Totem by 10 min. (Up from 4 minutes)
Glyph of Astral Recall - Cooldown of your Astral Recall spell reduced by 7.5 min. (Up from 2.5 min)
Glyph of Renewed Life - Your Reincarnation spell no longer requires a reagent. (Old - All stats increased by 5% for 1 min when you Reincarnate.)


More info on Mental Quickness

Shaman (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Mental Quickness
Mental Quickness was a talent designed to let a spec without a lot of spellpower (Enhancement) get a little more. As sometimes happens with talents like this, it looked very attractive to a spec with A LOT of spellpower (Elemental) as a way to get A LOT more. We had a very similar problem with Holy paladins wanting a Ret talent.

This is one of the reasons why you can't directly compare talents across the board. What is a small buff for one character can be a huge, huge buff to another.

While some amount of venturing into other trees is a good thing, in this case it was basically Elemental abandoning their own tree and able to do more damage playing as an Elemental (meaning casting spells) with someone else's tree, all because of one talent. This was not because the Elemental tree has bad talents. It was because Mental Quickness was not intended for characters with a lot of spellpower. Unfortunately in this case, we couldn't push the talent deep enough to prevent caster shamans from reaching it. While we do want to juice Elemental's dps, we don't want to do it this way.

Enhancement dps has been competitive overall. There are a lot of AP buffs in the game, so with this change unbuffed shamans will do a little more damage and buffed shamans might do a little less. It's also possible dps could actually go up in the long term depending on just how good Agility is for Enhancement with this change. It might change e.g. how you want to socket your gear.

EDIT: Deep down in this post I announced that we are reverting this change. Mental Quickness will still use AP to convert to spellpower.

[...] After looking at the numbers some more, we're not convinced we can inflate the Agility bonus to get Enhancement back to where it was before this change without leading to some pretty weird situations where Agility was valued above all else. We also hate losing the synergy with Mental Dexterity's AP boost.

Long story short, after reading your feedback and thinking about it some more, we no longer like this change and are going to revert it.

We will likely swap the positions of Mental Quickness and Static Shock as some of you have suggested.

Bottom line: Mental Quickness will still convert attack power to spell power. (Source)


Earlier Data
Shaman
Skills
Enhancement

Tremor Totem now lasts 5 minutes.
Magma Totem damage has been increased and no longer generate threat. (From 172 to 371 damage for Rank 7)

Talents
Elemental

Elemental Warding now reduces all damage taken by 2/4/6%. (Old - Reduces Fire/Frost/Nature damage by 4/7/10%)
Unrelenting Storm changed from 5 to 3 points. Now Regenerate mana equal to 4/8/12% of your Intellect every 5 sec, even while casting. (Old - 2/4/6/8/10%)
Elemental Shields has been removed.
Storm, Earth and Fire This talent has been moved up in the tree, and it’s talent points have been reduced to 3 down from 5. Wind Shock is also included in the range increase (with Earth Shock). The damage bonus to Flame Shock has been increased, up from 10/20/30/40/50 to 20/40/60.
*NEW TALENT* Shamanism - Your Lightning Bolt spell gains an additional 2/4/6/8/10% and your Lava Burst gains an additional 4/8/12/16/20% of your bonus damage effects.


Lots of changes. More damage from Magma totem is nice. We still are terrible on trash right now. The glyph changes are going to take some looking at to determine what to take now. LB glyph looks appealing especailly with ES glyph still bugged. I dont use Lava Lash enough to get a lot out of that glyph. Is 5% more WF proc chance better than 40% ap bonus? I'll let the EJ crowd figure that out for me.
5 minute Tremor Totem is ok as well. Most of the other changes are more impactful on Elemental or Resto.

2 comments:

Dagashai said...

Love the post... per Mental Quickness... I think the problem can be addressed by moving that talent that converts Int to AP 1:1.

(Sorry, at work and can't look this up...)

For enhance, thats a nice little AP boost. For elemental, with all the int they stack... well... combine that with MQ, and my resto shammy would have another 300 spell power just offa Int. Not to mention the int buff.

One problem... I really hate the lower levels of the talent trees. Lower level resto is horrible. Lower level elemental is just annoying. Only enhance seems to have talents with cross spec appeal. (and what appeal! thundering strikes, yum... and 10% more int in the MELEE DPS TREE?)

Maybe a bit more pruning of the trees is in order. I would love to see more utilitarian talents in the first tiers... (and would kill to get unrelenting storm where resto could get at it... would this *really* be that overpowered?)

WTFspaghetti said...

Alot of changes on the horizons...

Should be fun, especially if you are an elemental spec.

Nice blog, I added to my list

shaman ftw